Combining client and network-based Distributed Mobility Management A hybrid approach

The introduction of modern portable devices has exacerbated the increase of mobile data demand from users. These new mobile terminals exhibit a great variety of applications, some of which require active sessions to be maintained, while others are just short-lived. This introduces additional challenges to mobility management, which traditionally assumed that all traffic had to be mobility-enabled. Altogether, mobile network operators are now facing the challenges posed by a huge data demand generated by users that are able to connect from different access networks and establish several active sessions simultaneously, while being mobile. This triggered the introduction of a new paradigm: the distributed mobility management (DMM) which aims at flattening the network and distributing the entities in charge of managing users’ mobility. This article describes a novel hybrid DMM solution which benefits from combining a network-based mobility approach, based on Proxy Mobile IPv6, with a client-based one, based on Mobile IPv6. This combination provides additional flexibility to the mobile network operators, which can decide when and how to combine these two approaches. An analytic evaluation of the solution is also provided, comparing the obtained results to the classical centralised mobility approaches. Also, a real implementation for two network-based DMM solutions has been developed, proving the feasibility of the design and showing The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2009-5) under grant agreement n. 258053 (MEDIEVAL project) and from the Spanish Government, MICINN, under research grant TIN2010-20136-C03. Fabio Giust Institute IMDEA Networks University Carlos III of Madrid, E-mail: [email protected] Carlos J. Bernardos · Antonio de la Oliva University Carlos III of Madrid, E-mail: {cjbc, aoliva}@it.uc3m.es 2 Fabio Giust et al. that the overall performance for the two solutions highly depends on the underlying network topology. This study provides the trade-offs that an operator should consider when deploying a distributed mobility management architecture.